UC athletic director Whit Babcock, left, seated next to head football coach Butch Jones, says said lamenting the loss of the Big East's current automatic qualifier status is pointless. / Enquirer file photo

Written by

Writer’s note: This is one of those boring but necessary columns that has to do with money and power and who has them and who doesn’t. It’s the sports writing equivalent of eating your vegetables. If you don’t like vegetables, the Sudoku is in the back of the Metro section and The View is on Channel 9.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Important things have happened to college football in the last several days. Since the shape of quasi-am football shifts every other day, it’s important to know the current shape, so two years from now you’re not wondering why UC’s reward for winning the Big East is not a trip to the Orange Bowl, but a slog to the Port-O-Let Instant Sanitation Classic. That didn’t used to be possible. Starting in 2014, it will be.

What has happened is this: The Big East will be a national player in football, still. Not a prime player. Those days are gone after next season. But a player nonetheless. Picture a kid with his nose pressed against the toy store window, hoping to be let in to play with the big kids.

The BCS commissioners and something called the Presidential Oversight Committee have decreed that there will be six major bowls. The “Power Five’’ conferences will get 11 of the 12 spots in those bowls. A conglomeration of lesser conferences known as The Group of Five -- including the Big East – will get one spot.

If you think that’s fair, you’re obviously an SEC fan.

Big East folks are happy about this. "They did it with a smile on their faces," Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman said of the Group of Five.

They did? What sort of smile? The smile that Kevin Bacon offered as a frat-boy pledge in Animal House, as he was getting whacked on the butt with a paddle?

Thank you, sir, may I have another.

That sort of smile?

Power and money get consolidated into five conferences. Meantime, The Group of Five is the family mutt, loitering beneath the dinner table, hoping a small child loses a hunk of burger off a bun.

It’s a measure of how the Big East’s football status has plummeted that conference high-ups rejoiced at the news. “The best scenario we could have, in the new format,’’ said UC athletic director Whit Babcock.

Babcock said lamenting the loss of the league’s current automatic qualifier status is pointless. What matters is that the Big East is still big-bowl relevant, even if it now lives on the fringes of polite society. The highest-ranked team from the Group of Five will get the 12th seat at the big-boy table. That would have been the Big East champ seven of the previous eight years, including UC twice.

The league should also reap a TV dollars bonanza in the near future. It had the good fortune of having its current deal expire just as more networks wanted to pour more money into sports programming. When Babcock describes it, he sounds like an MBA, not an AD.

“There is a lot of demand in the marketplace,’’ he said. “Ours is the last inventory that is available for the next eight years.’’ All the other major conferences are locked up that long. “We’ll have schools in four time zones. That’s a lot of inventory. If a major network wants in on top-level football, this is their last shot. There is a lot of demand for sports content.’’

What all that means to the rest of us is, the new Big East TV deal will be better, thanks to more suitors and greater interest in televised sports overall. Networks covet sports, because people watch it live. They don’t tend to DVR through the ads..

There is something rotten about the rich getting richer by denying the poor access. Despite the rhetoric, that is what’s going on here. It’s also inevitable. UC has a chance at a spot in the toy store. That’s all the Bearcats can ask, for now.

A gold star to those of you reading this far. Remember it, and amaze your friends. You’ll be a hit at parties.